DOCSLIB.ORG

Descent from the Earthborn: the Exemplar of Erechtheus Within Euripidean Tragedy

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Descent from the Earthborn: the Exemplar of Erechtheus Within Euripidean Tragedy Descent from the Earthborn: The Exemplar of Erechtheus within Euripidean Tragedy The Athenian hero Erechtheus has remained a rather mysterious figure, his explicit role historiographically muddled and partially lost because of his placement in the mythological genealogy between the autochthonous founding monarchs of Athens and the celebrated figure of Theseus. Due to the survivorship bias of available primary source material regarding his role in the self-identity of the Athenians, modern scholarship often exhibits extensive gaps and inconsistences. Only once the lens through which Erechtheus is viewed is refocused to reflect specifically how he was conceived by Athenians in their own time can a general picture of his importance to them in the fifth century BCE emerge. The aggrandizement of the cults of Athena Polias and Poseidon-Erechtheus through the construction of the Erechtheion atop the Acropolis has been discussed at length in secondary scholarship, such as through the prominent visibility of the new temple from the agora and the Panathenaic Way (Gerding 2006, 399). Nevertheless, a closer examination of the role of Erechtheus in Euripidean tragedy can allow even deeper insights into how Athenians perceived him as a moral exemplar in light of the developments of the Peloponnesian War. One avenue to explore how the Athenians interpreted their situation during the Peloponnesian War through the myth of Erechtheus is the Euripidean tragedy Erechtheus. Whereas Joan Breton Connelly has recently brought attention to how the extant fragments of this drama illustrate the significance of Erechtheus within fifth-century Athenian religion and potentially in relation to the Parthenon, her specific insights into the play itself may be further examined in light of the timing of their composition (Connelly 2014, 165). Performed most likely in 422 BCE on the eve of the Peace of Nicias, Erechtheus portrayed the necessity of the losses associated with warfare to maintain Athenian sovereignty (Eur. Fr. 360.1–55 = Lycurg. 1.100). In accordance with the cathartic purpose of tragedy espoused by Aristotle in his Poetics, Euripides called on his audience to empathize with Erechtheus’s willing sacrifice of his daughter synonymously with the loss of their own sons in the decades-long conflict of the Peloponnesian War (Arist. Poet. 1449b.21–29). Yet, true to his nature as a voice of discontent against the expectations of the Athenians, Euripides furthermore presented Erechtheus as a commentary on the meaning of the Peloponnesian War itself. In the fragments of Erechtheus preserved within the Florilegium of Stobaios, the namesake protagonist fiercely denounces the committing of unjust actions and the desire for plunder in warfare (Eur. Fr. 352–54 = Stob. Flor. 4.13.12–13, 4.31.105). This theme must have rung true for the Athenians as a result of the questionable methods by which Athens had attained her empire, seized the treasury of the Delian League for its own building purposes, and neared committing a massacre during the Mytilenian Debate. However, Euripides authored a vivid counterpoint to Erechtheus in his Ion. Staged circa 414–412 BCE following the destruction of Melos and either contemporaneously with or immediately following the Sicilian Expedition, this play bypassed his prior discussion of just war in order to highlight the grimmest consequences of Erechtheus’s actions. The lament over the death of youth in war was transformed into an abomination, for Euripides deliberately selected the alternate version in which Erechtheus sacrificed three daughters. Rather than him grudgingly offering a single child for the sake of defending his city, Kreousa proclaims that Erechtheus “dared to slay the maidens, sacrifices for the earth” (Eur. Ion 278). Despite this transformation in his actions, the significance of Erechtheus as a foundational hero for Athenian identity remains a constant theme throughout the play, as descent from Erechtheus was perceived as crucial to Athenian claims to autochthony. Kreousa ultimately responds to the revelation that Ion is her son through the lens of autochthony, declaring that “Erechtheus grows young again, and the earth- begotten house no longer looks upon night” (Eur. Ion 1465–1466). Thus, the narrative of Erechtheus provided significant meaning to the Athenians in the fifth century BCE, as demonstrated by Euripides’s use of his mythology to explain the realities of the Peloponnesian War. Through his position as a foundational hero, however subtle, Erechtheus not only inspired the building projects atop their Acropolis and multiple works of literature, but also conferred upon them their nickname as a people: the Erechtheidai. The Athenians perhaps felt no need to comment at length on their affinity toward Erechtheus outside these few sources, for to them, it was obvious. Bibliography Collard, Christopher, and Martin Cropp, trans. and eds. 2008. Euripides VII: Fragments Aegeus– Meleager. Loeb Classical Library 504. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Connelly, Joan Breton. 2014. The Parthenon Enigma. New York: Random House LLC. Gerding, Henrik. 2006. “The Erechtheion and the Panathenaic Procession.” American Journal of Archaeology 110, no. 3: 389–401. .
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Athenians and Eleusinians in the West Pediment of the Parthenon
    ATHENIANS AND ELEUSINIANS IN THE WEST PEDIMENT OF THE PARTHENON (PLATE 95) T HE IDENTIFICATION of the figuresin the west pedimentof the Parthenonhas long been problematic.I The evidencereadily enables us to reconstructthe composition of the pedimentand to identify its central figures.The subsidiaryfigures, however, are rath- er more difficult to interpret. I propose that those on the left side of the pediment may be identifiedas membersof the Athenian royal family, associatedwith the goddessAthena, and those on the right as membersof the Eleusinian royal family, associatedwith the god Posei- don. This alignment reflects the strife of the two gods on a heroic level, by referringto the legendary war between Athens and Eleusis. The recognition of the disjunctionbetween Athenians and Eleusinians and of parallelism and contrastbetween individualsand groups of figures on the pedimentpermits the identificationof each figure. The referenceto Eleusis in the pediment,moreover, indicates the importanceof that city and its majorcult, the Eleu- sinian Mysteries, to the Athenians. The referencereflects the developmentand exploitation of Athenian control of the Mysteries during the Archaic and Classical periods. This new proposalfor the identificationof the subsidiaryfigures of the west pedimentthus has critical I This article has its origins in a paper I wrote in a graduateseminar directedby ProfessorJohn Pollini at The Johns Hopkins University in 1979. I returned to this paper to revise and expand its ideas during 1986/1987, when I held the Jacob Hirsch Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. In the summer of 1988, I was given a grant by the Committeeon Research of Tulane University to conduct furtherresearch for the article.
    [Show full text]
  • (Eponymous) Heroes
    is is a version of an electronic document, part of the series, Dēmos: Clas- sical Athenian Democracy, a publicationpublication ofof e Stoa: a consortium for electronic publication in the humanities [www.stoa.org]. e electronic version of this article off ers contextual information intended to make the study of Athenian democracy more accessible to a wide audience. Please visit the site at http:// www.stoa.org/projects/demos/home. Athenian Political Art from the fi h and fourth centuries: Images of Tribal (Eponymous) Heroes S e Cleisthenic reforms of /, which fi rmly established democracy at Ath- ens, imposed a new division of Attica into ten tribes, each of which consti- tuted a new political and military unit, but included citizens from each of the three geographical regions of Attica – the city, the coast, and the inland. En- rollment in a tribe (according to heredity) was a manda- tory prerequisite for citizenship. As usual in ancient Athenian aff airs, politics and reli- gion came hand in hand and, a er due consultation with Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, each new tribe was assigned to a particular hero a er whom the tribe was named; the ten Amy C. Smith, “Athenian Political Art from the Fi h and Fourth Centuries : Images of Tribal (Eponymous) Heroes,” in C. Blackwell, ed., Dēmos: Classical Athenian Democracy (A.(A. MahoneyMahoney andand R.R. Scaife,Scaife, edd.,edd., e Stoa: a consortium for electronic publication in the humanities [www.stoa.org], . © , A.C. Smith. tribal heroes are thus known as the eponymous (or name giving) heroes. T : Aristotle indicates that each hero already received worship by the time of the Cleisthenic reforms, although little evi- dence as to the nature of the worship of each hero is now known (Aristot.
    [Show full text]
  • The Higher Aspects of Greek Religion. Lectures Delivered at Oxford and In
    BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME FROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIET OF Henirg m. Sage 1891 .A^^^ffM3. islm^lix.. 5931 CornelJ University Library BL 25.H621911 The higher aspects of Greek religion.Lec 3 1924 007 845 450 The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924007845450 THE HIBBERT LECTURES SECOND SERIES 1911 THE HIBBERT LECTURES SECOND SERIES THE HIGHER ASPECTS OF GREEK RELIGION LECTURES DELIVERED AT OXFORD AND IN LONDON IN APRIL AND MAY igii BY L. R. FARNELL, D.Litt. WILDE LECTURER IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD LONDON WILLIAMS AND NORGATE GARDEN, W.C. 14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT 1912 CONTENTS Lecture I GENERAL FEATURES AND ORIGINS OF GREEK RELIGION Greek religion mainly a social-political system, 1. In its earliest " period a " theistic creed, that is^ a worship of personal individual deities, ethical personalities rather than mere nature forces, 2. Anthrqgomorphism its predominant bias, 2-3. Yet preserving many primitive features of " animism " or " animatism," 3-5. Its progress gradual without violent break with its distant past, 5-6. The ele- ment of magic fused with the religion but not predominant, 6-7. Hellenism and Hellenic religion a blend of two ethnic strains, one North-Aryan, the other Mediterranean, mainly Minoan-Mycenaean, 7-9. Criteria by which we can distinguish the various influences of these two, 9-1 6. The value of Homeric evidence, 18-20. Sum- mary of results, 21-24. Lecture II THE RELIGIOUS BOND AND MORALITY OF THE FAMILY The earliest type of family in Hellenic society patrilinear, 25-27.
    [Show full text]
  • Devising Descent Mime, Katabasis and Ritual in Theocritus' Idyll 15 Hans Jorgen Hansen a Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Th
    Devising Descent Mime, Katabasis and Ritual in Theocritus’ Idyll 15 Hans Jorgen Hansen A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Classics. Chapel Hill 2010 Approved by: Dr. William H. Race Dr. Owen Goslin Dr. Werner Riess Abstract Hans Jorgen Hansen: Devising Descent: Mime, Katabasis and Ritual in Theocritus’ Idyll 15 (Under the direction of Dr. William H. Race) In this thesis I investigate the genres and structure of Theocritus’ fifteenth Idyll, as well as its katabatic and ritual themes. Though often considered an urban mime, only the first 43 lines exhibit the formal qualities of mime found in Herodas’ Mimiambi, the only other surviving corpus of Hellenistic mime. The counterpoint to the mimic first section is the Adonia that makes up the last section of the poem and amounts to an urban recasting of pastoral poetry. A polyphonic, katabatic journey bridges the mimic and pastoral sections and is composed of four encounters that correspond to ordeals found in ritual katabases. The structure of the poem is then tripartite, beginning in the profane world of the household mime, progressing through the liminal space of the streets and ending in the sacred world of the Adonia. This progression mirrors Theocritus’ evolution from Syracusan mimic poet to Alexandrian pastoral poet. ii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Mime and Structure in the Adoniazusae 6 1.1: Introduction 6 1.2.1: The Formal Features of Herodas’ Poetry 12 1.2.2: Homophony and Herodas’ Fourth Mimiamb 21 1.3.1: Theocritus’ Household-Mime 26 1.3.2: The Streets of Alexandria and Theocritus’ Polyphonic Mime 32 1.4: Conclusion 41 Chapter 2: Katabasis and Ritual in the Adoniazusae 44 2.1: Introduction 44 2.2: The Katabatic Structure, Characters and Imagery of Theoc.
    [Show full text]
  • Torresson Umn 0130E 21011.Pdf
    The Curious Case of Erysichthon A Dissertation SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Elizabeth Torresson IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Advisor: Nita Krevans December 2019 © Elizabeth Torresson 2019 Acknowledgments First, I would like to thank the department for their support and especially the members of my committee: Nita Krevans, Susanna Ferlito, Jackie Murray, Christopher Nappa, and Melissa Harl Sellew. The seeds of this dissertation were planted in my senior year of college when Jackie Murray spread to me with her contagious enthusiasm a love of Hellenistic poetry. Without her genuine concern for my success and her guidance in those early years, I would not be where I am today. I also owe a shout-out to my undergraduate professors, especially Robin Mitchell-Boyask and Daniel Tompkins, who inspired my love of Classics. At the University of Minnesota, Nita Krevans took me under her wing and offered both emotional and intellectual support at various stages along the way. Her initial suggestions, patience, and encouragement allowed this dissertation to take the turn that it did. I am also very grateful to Christopher Nappa and Melissa Harl Sellew for their unflagging encouragement and kindness over the years. It was in Melissa’s seminar that an initial piece of this dissertation was begun. My heartfelt thanks also to Susanna Ferlito, who graciously stepped in at the last minute and offered valuable feedback, and to Susan Noakes, for offering independent studies so that I could develop my interest in Italian language and literature.
    [Show full text]
  • GREEK RELIGION Walter Burkert
    GREEK RELIGION Walter Burkert Translated by John Raffan r Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts THINGS’ ANIMAL SACRIFICE II t . I ‘WORKING SACRED 55 diverted activity for the apathy which remains transfixed in reality; it lays claim to the highest seriousness, to the absolute. II When considered from the point of view of the goal, ritual behaviour appears as magic. For a science of religion which regards only instrumental 4 since acts action as meaningful, magic must be seen as the origin of religion, Ritual and Sanctuary which seek to achieve a given goal in an unclear but direct way are magical. The goal then appears to be the attainment of all desirable boons and the elimination of possible impediments: there is rain magic, fertility magic, love magic, and destructive magic. The conception of ritual as a kind of language, however, leads beyond this constraining artifice; magic is present only insofar as ritual is consciously placed in the service of some end — which may then undoubtedly affect the form of the ritual. Religious ritual is given as a collective institution; the individual participates within the framework of social communication, with the strongest motivating force being the need not in the study of religion which came to be generally acknowledged to stand apart. Conscious magic is a matter for individuals, for the few, and An insight are more important and end of the last century is that rituals is developed accordingly into a highly complicated pseudo-science. In early towards the ancient religions than are instructive for the understanding of the Greece, where the cult belongs in the communal, public sphere, the more is no longer seen in myths.’ With this recognition, antiquity importance of magic is correspondingly minimal.
    [Show full text]
  • The Parthenon and the Erechtheion: the Architectural Formation of Place, Politics and Myth
    77 The Journal of Architecture Volume 9 Spring 2004 The Parthenon and the Erechtheion: the architectural formation of place, politics and myth Sophia Psarra The Welsh School of Architecture, Bute Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff, UK So grey-eyed Athena spoke and went away from him across the barren and open water, left lovely Scheria and came to Marathon and to Athens of the wide ways, and entered the close-built house of Erechtheus. Odyssey, vii, 81. I came to the study of the Parthenon and the Erechtheion from outside the areas of archaeology and art history. My interest in the two buildings is in their architecture and more specifically in the contribution this makes to their cultural meaning. However, the most compelling argument of archaeologists and art historians supports my intentions: both the sculptures and the building were integral components of a single whole. I will extend this argument by indicating that the architecture of the two temples, their art, their cults and the entire scheme of which they were part, belonged to a greater whole. I will suggest that they were all responsible, all tightly interwoven in the construction and expression of the religious, political and cultural narrative and content. To modern eyes, Greek temples retain either the status of a remote but timeless past subject to historical, stylistic and proportional analysis, or the romantic status of antiquity and ruins. In what follows I have used existing evidence and sources neither to reinforce these positions, nor to solve problems that archaeology and related disciplines have been more successfully addressing.
    [Show full text]
  • Between Two Worlds Ovid Shaping Literary Tradition from Virgil to the Post-Classical
    Between Two Worlds Ovid Shaping Literary Tradition from Virgil to the Post-Classical A panel proposal for CA 2020 Chair: Alison Sharrock, University of Manchester Preamble Herman Fränkel’s seminal book Ovid: A Poet between Two Worlds (1945) sought, against the background of 19th-century classicism and aversion to all things ‘declining’, to situate the maverick late-Augustan as speaking not only to the classical world but also the Christian culture of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. For much of the 20th century, Ovid was perceived, not always positively, as the mediator between so-called Golden and Silver Latin poetry, and as such was used (one might say) to explain, excuse, or excoriate the ‘silveriness’ of post-Augustan poetry. Then came the explosion of interest in Neronian and Flavian literature towards the end of the last century up to the present day, in which, despite massive ongoing interest in Ovid’s poetry itself, the role of the Metamorphoses as a mediator between the Aeneid and later epic was somewhat lost in the face of the sophisticated exploration of Virgilian intertextuality for post-Augustan Latin epic which was the legacy of Philip Hardie’s important book, The Epic Successors of Virgil (1993). Despite a special issue of Arethusa (2002) which sought to re-contextualise for the new millennium the ancient reception of Ovid, the dominance of Virgil in later Latin poetry has continued to occlude the role of Ovid in literary history, especially of the first century after the death of Augustus. The present panel proposes to look again at the diachronic intertextuality of ancient epic, looking both backwards and forwards from Ovid.
    [Show full text]
  • Divine Riddles: a Sourcebook for Greek and Roman Mythology March, 2014
    Divine Riddles: A Sourcebook for Greek and Roman Mythology March, 2014 E. Edward Garvin, Editor What follows is a collection of excerpts from Greek literary sources in translation. The intent is to give students an overview of Greek mythology as expressed by the Greeks themselves. But any such collection is inherently flawed: the process of selection and abridgement produces a falsehood because both the narrative and meta-narrative are destroyed when the continuity of the composition is interrupted. Nevertheless, this seems the most expedient way to expose students to a wide range of primary source information. I have tried to keep my voice out of it as much as possible and will intervene as editor (in this Times New Roman font) only to give background or exegesis to the text. All of the texts in Goudy Old Style are excerpts from Greek or Latin texts (primary sources) that have been translated into English. Ancient Texts In the field of Classics, we refer to texts by Author, name of the book, book number, chapter number and line number.1 Every text, regardless of language, uses the same numbering system. Homer’s Iliad, for example, is divided into 24 books and the lines in each book are numbered. Hesiod’s Theogony is much shorter so no book divisions are necessary but the lines are numbered. Below is an example from Homer’s Iliad, Book One, showing the English translation on the left and the Greek original on the right. When citing this text we might say that Achilles is first mentioned by Homer in Iliad 1.7 (i.7 is also acceptable).
    [Show full text]
  • Poseidon's Eris with Athena in the West Pediment of The
    TO CHEAT OR NOT TO CHEAT: POSEIDON’S ERIS WITH ATHENA IN THE WEST PEDIMENT OF THE PARTHENON For more than 2000 years (from the 430s BC to 1801), visitors of the Acropolis who had passed the Propylaia were faced with an imposing image at the most prominent building of the sanctuary, the Parthenon. Its west pediment, almost 30m wide, presented a composition of more than two dozen marble figures, bigger than life-size. The sculptures were comparatively well preserved when the Marquis de Nointel visited Athens in 1674 (thirteen years before the disastrous explosion during the Venetian siege in 1687) and a Flemish artist in his entourage made a drawing (falsely attributed to Jacques Carrey; fig. 1-2). It documents only minor damage (the head of the female protagonist was missing, as were the horses in the southern half of the pediment).1 Thanks to this drawing and to intensive research of numerous scholars it was possible to achieve a widely accepted reconstruction of the composition (fig. 3).2 Since 2009, the New Acropolis Museum presents the sculptures preserved in Athens combined with casts of the pieces kept in the British Museum and elsewhere (fig. 4-5).3 1. The issue – Poseidon’s eris with Athena – and the crucial question: Did the goddess win by cheating? Pausanias, the only author who explicitly refers to the composition in the pediment, informs us about its theme: ἡ Ποσειδῶνος πρὸς Ἀθηνᾶν ἐστιν ἔρις ὑπὲρ τῆς γῆς.4 This eris is first mentioned by Herodotus: 1 Brommer (1963) 115-116 pl. 64; Meyer (2017a) 399-402 fig.
    [Show full text]
  • Divine Madness and Conflict at Delphi
    Kernos Revue internationale et pluridisciplinaire de religion grecque antique 5 | 1992 Varia Divine Madness and Conflict at Delphi Bernard C. Dietrich Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/kernos/1047 DOI: 10.4000/kernos.1047 ISSN: 2034-7871 Publisher Centre international d'étude de la religion grecque antique Printed version Date of publication: 1 January 1992 ISSN: 0776-3824 Electronic reference Bernard C. Dietrich, « Divine Madness and Conflict at Delphi », Kernos [Online], 5 | 1992, Online since 19 April 2011, connection on 01 May 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/kernos/1047 ; DOI : 10.4000/kernos.1047 Kernos Kernos, 5 (1992), p. 41-58. DNINE MADNESS AND CONFLICT AT DELPID Orgiastikos, orgasmos, orgastes were secondary formations from orgia. Orgia originally conveyed a neutral meaning describing the cultic dromena, that is calm, unexcited ritual and sacrifice1. Notions of wild, ecstatic performances orgia acquired later when associated with a particular kind of cult. From the 6th century B.e. the word assumed the status of a technical term to describe the 'private' dromena of Demeter's Eleusinian Mysteries, and in particular the mystic rites of Bacchus which provided the route of the word's semantic development2. The mystery movement in the Greek world was an archaic phenomenon, it was then that the special rites of Dionysus began to spring into prominence reflecting the contemporary urge for spiritual union with the divine. Mystery religions had a common factor with inspirational oracles which also belonged to the archaic age rather than to prehistoric times. Inspiration, even enthusiasmos, but not divine or human frenzy : that came later and not before the end of the 5th century B.e.3 Plato defined oracular together with poetic frenzy as forms of mania : for him mantike and manike were etymologically identical4.
    [Show full text]
  • Euripides, Medea
    Euripides Medea 431 BC This translation by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, has certain copyright restrictions. For information please use the following link: Copyright. For comments or question please contact Ian Johnston. This translation is available as a paperback book from Richer Resources Publications. Euripides Medea Dramatis Personae Nurse: a servant of Medea. Tutor: a servant assigned to Jason's children. Medea: wife of Jason. Chorus: a group of Corinthian women. Creon: king of Corinth. Jason: husband of Medea. Aegeus: king of Athens. Messenger: a servant of Jason's. Children: Medea's and Jason's two young sons. Attendants on Creon and Jason. [Outside the home of Jason and Medea in Corinth. The Nurse, a slave who serves Medea, is standing by herself] NURSE Oh how I wish that ship the Argo had never sailed off to the land of Colchis, past the Symplegades, those dark dancing rocks which smash boats sailing through the Hellespont. I wish they'd never chopped the pine trees down in those mountain forests up on Pelion, to make oars for the hands of those great men who set off, on Pelias' orders, to fetch the golden fleece. Then my mistress, Medea, never would've sailed away 10 to the towers in the land of Iolcus, her heart passionately in love with Jason. She'd never have convinced those women, Pelias' daughters, to kill their father. She'd not have come to live in Corinth here, [10] with her husband and her children—well loved in exile by those whose land she'd moved to.
    [Show full text]